Great news for Canadians who care about putting an end to racism and bigotry in our country! According to Rex Murphy, white Baby Boomer and self-styled expert on the subject, racism is not a big problem in Canada. To believe otherwise is to be in the throes of “Liberal” hysteria.
All along, apparently, the project of becoming “woke” has been a fool’s gambit – not only for its pretentiousness, but for its oppressiveness to those who never intend to be bigoted, sexist, or racist, but can’t help it because they were raised that way. It’s time we cut unwitting bigots and chauvinists some slack.
We should take to heart Rex’s assurances that white, elite Boomers like him, and the country they ensconced with racist tropes, have “come a long way” from those bygone days of unbridled chauvinism and ethnic colonization. We may never be a “woke” nation – however an opposite-of-woke guy like Murphy might frame it – but at least we’re no longer teeming with xenophobic troglodytes, right? Three cheers for a post-racial Canada. Hip, hip, hoo …
To this I say: Fuck you and your rants against ethical progress, Rex Murphy.
Indeed, in terms of offensive polemic, it may be the pot calling the kettle black. That said, it’s one thing to utter profanities after having been subject to race-baiting invective; quite another to serve up a racism apologia to those who have spent a lifetime adversely affected by it in the first place. That, in my humble opinion, is a gargantuan pile of festering profanity. I’m calling it as I see it, with candour.
I cannot tell a lie: When an old, pissed off, reactionary white guy opens his blathering, pontificating mouth to proclaim how Canada is only a little bit racist, I’m going to fervently object. I’ve been sporting a shit-eating grin as I choked back a lifetime of racist jabs and uppercuts, and witnessed countless more racist atrocities committed against others. I am so fucking done. Why should I have to keep biting my tongue when an old white guy – always an old white guy – says, “Come on boy, what more do you expect?”
I expect people to at least try to be decent to their fellow human beings, whether they look the same or different; whether they pray to the same god, a different god, several gods, or no gods at all. I expect that, if someone says, “I feel that what you said/did was insensitive” a person will be able to say, “I’m sorry”.
But Rex and people of his ilk don’t want to. They’re intent on being indecent bigots; even if less so than in the past, when bigotry was widespread and socially acceptable. They are intent on claiming ignorance as an excuse for their lousy, abusive misconduct.
I’m so done with being gracious in the face of racism. I’ve been laughing it off for four decades. I’m not the only one who’s fed up. The responses to Murphy’s column have been ubiquitous and unequivocal in their denunciation, it propelled the editors to preface it by saying, effectively, “We fucked up by running it.”
My ire has been several infuriating decades in the making. Get this, there’s an old white guy who’s sick and tired of people saying racism is an issue in Canada. He’s so sure of the sanity and gravitas of his feelings on this point he puts quill to sheepskin (what he learned to write with in his day) and stridently orders us to stop whining about it. For fuck sakes, we’re well into the twenty first century; we BIPOC should not have to endure the caustic insults of a chauvinist asshole in a national newspaper.
Every day we’re subjected to a racist jab here, and a dog whistler uppercut there, each of them delivering a blow to genuine efforts to wean our country off its addiction to white, male chauvinism. Not a week goes by without my consciousness being gang banged by the likes of Rex Murphy, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, and a litany of US Republican politicians, pundits, and judges – Baby Boomer misanthropes who, thanks to modern medicine are still alive and determined not to go to their graves gracefully. Instead, they’re using their last days on earth to repeal the hard won rights of women, pillage the earth, steal more of society’s wealth from the youth, and soil public consciousness a little more, just for good measure, before they check out.
“Here Ye! Hear Ye! I, Rex Murphy, blowhard man-splainer, do hereby pronounce racism and rainbow-coloured unicorns exist in equal degrees in Canada!”
For the old timers still alive and kicking, who want the world to look and feel like it did in nineteen forty-six, when things “were simpler,” Rex Murphy’s your man. He’s fighting to keep a system where whiteness and maleness are the straightest paths to power and influence in the culture; more than ability, competence, skills, and ethical backbone.
Murphy wants people to stop fighting against systems and structures that punish diversity and difference. His knowledge is so outdated he has no idea how cognitive bias works, which is why he dismisses it as irrelevant in determining how structures fashioned long ago by white men can be inherently stacked against anyone else. Still. Instead of educating himself on the complexities of systemic racism he focuses on cutting down and invalidating the experiences of those adversely affected by them.
Neither I nor any BIPOC should have to say this anymore, but white guys like Rex Murphy cannot possibly know what it is to experience racism or sexism in Canada. In that context not only was Murphy’s column crass and inflammatory in presuming to say anything edifying or relevant on the subject of racism, but it crossed the line by dismissing the lived experiences of actual people of colour in this country. As usual, Rex Murphy, the white guy whose relevance and intellectual acuity seems to have left him twenty years ago, got the national newspaper column where he was able to utter such foul viewpoints. The rest of us got a bigoted dick-slap across our consciousness by a white guy intent on recklessly abusing his power. Again. Still.
It’s time for Murphy to hang up his bitter quill. Now. Let me say it again: may you fuck off into retirement. May you be peaceful and content hurling bigoted, sexist epithets at random snowflakes from your beachside veranda, where there is minimal risk your insults will have wide berth to offend unwitting folks who did nothing – other than be BIPOC – to deserve it.
Is that mean spirited? Perhaps. But Murphy regularly takes the exit ramp off the high road to unleash ignorant, bigoted tirades from the national pedestal assholes like him always enjoy, thanks to the cronyism of their male, Boomer peers. I’m no longer down with the spirit of, “let’s coddle unwitting bigots.” It hasn’t worked.
Want proof? Rex Murphy. The surly curmudgeon had a regular spot on CBC’s The National for years and now has a column in the National Post. Being an old, bigoted warthog still wins a white guy a pedestal in Canada. It proves what every person of colour who has lived in Canada for the last several decades has known their whole lives: Canada isn’t really better than this. Not yet. We are nowhere close to leaving our racist history behind us. We are only now just beginning to walk that path of redemption.
Listen here, bigoted motherfuckers, the profanity of this rebuttal signifies the profane insult of a privilege-festooned, bloviating elite Boomer having a pedestal and using it to defend a system of racial bias that elevated and enriched mediocre white-guys like him while excluding, marginalizing, or disenfranchising women and BIPOC. That system tried to eradicate this country’s indigenous people, scooped up and trafficked indigenous children, stole them from their parents and shipped them off to Catholic prisons, and buried their bodies by the thousands in unmarked graves across the country; absolute, racist indignities we are only now acknowledging happened. According to Rex the Righteous, none of this is emblematic of a country with a racism problem.
Fuck You and your clown-like melon filled with such bigoted lunacy, Rex Murphy. Back in the day your self-righteous, indignant diatribes on CBC were amusing, despite your grim appearance and caustic demeanour. Your perennially pissed off mug was the springboard for some chortles. It was funny when you mocked the kind of fetid stupidity and idiocy that you and your confrère Conrad Black, unrepentant jailbird that he is, regularly unleash on the world today. It’s an understatement to say your surly persona is not so endearing when you’re choosing to mock those who speak out against bigotry, sexism, and xenophobia.
Your tirades are banal and predictable in their reactionary blathering against progressive, ethical change. “Back in my day Merry Christmas never hurt anyone.” Yawn. “Hey You People, speak English in my country!” Snooze. “Leave our genocidal history in the past – where it belongs.” There he goes again.
Hey Rex Murphy, didn’t you hear? Nostalgia is so Third Reich, so Vladimir Putin, so next wave fascism. Knee jerk chauvinism is so trailer park chic, so Mississippi Burning. Telling victims of atrocities unleashed upon them by a nation for centuries to “let bygones be bygones” is so … fucking insidious.
If they ever decide to produce a dark-comedic remake of All in the Family, my vote is for Rex Murphy to be cast as Nihilist Archie Bunker. That way his claims as an expert in Canadian racism will be situated in their proper context; and invite the ridicule, scorn, and derision such a pathetic figure deserves.
If you’re a pissed off old curmudgeon using your power to disparage those fighting to get through a single day without having chauvinist indecency shoved in their face like a rancid cream pie, get the fuck off the stage. I don’t mean any of you ill will; I’m just done having to withstand another reactionary, entitled male frothing at the mouth with a bigoted hissy fit from a powerful cultural pedestal. Enough is enough.
So, fuck off Rex Murphy and the red-necked donkey you rode into town on. Peace out.
edmund k. saunders 
I do agree with your remarks about white privilege and how they only want things to go back-to horrible oppression of indigenous and others who were cruelly and treated inhumanly- the people in your article is rightly called what they, callous bigoted racists egotistical jerks!